Game:

Blinx: The Time Sweeper (2002)

Duration: 8:56:08

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Part 2. Yup, I raged at a kids game and I am not proud of myself. I have been waiting to play this game for almost 20 years and I was greatly anticipating an amazing experience. Over the years I had heard many wonderful things about this game and it only increased my desire to play it. For some strange reason I just never got around to it. I just made excuses to keep pushing it aside, so I finally decided to pop it in my XBOX and sit myself down and have a good time. I was excited with what I thought was going to be a bit of a puzzle platformer with some light action elements and boy was I wrong. The graphics in this game are quite nice and the music has some decent moments. Blinx does not control great and is a bit sluggish, most enemies are way faster than him. The camera is atrocious and was the real thing I was combating. The auto-lock on can be extremely frustrating especially in close quarters and more often than not I found myself staring at walls and the ground versus the enemies attacking me. Even when there weren't any enemies around the camera would randomly sweep around and could easily cause Blinx to run off platforms or jump into pits. I found myself fairly often jumping between platforms only to find myself plummeting into a pit because the camera adjusted itself and I was then making an errant jump. The games time mechanic is really cool in theory and not that great in practice. Games should never rely on an RNG mechanic to lock progress behind. There were numerous times I was forced to reset a level losing minutes of time because I was softlocked and stymied in a level because I didn't have the correct time tool since the enemies didn't drop the needed crystals. Now you could say -- well why don't you always carry one of each time control? The simple answer is that it's not always possible, especially early game when you can carry only 3. To make matters worse, money to purchase things is not very plentiful and you will at some point be forced to grind for it. Even worse is the fact that you can only have one Sweeper, your weapon, at a time and if for some reason you come across areas or enemies that could be dealt with with another one you have to purchase that one and then re-buy your former one if you want to switch again. There is no weapon wheel or a way to re-select your previously bought Sweepers. The problem is that some enemies take 10 plus pieces of trash to defeat and multi-hit enemies are very common. The game just doesn't respect the players time. The worst part of the game is the final boss. It relies on the RNG mechanic too heavily and you need your time controls to defeat it, but the crystals that drop are RNG dependent so the game can be kind or mean and more often than not it's just a waiting game with a clock ticking down. I was very close to straight up quitting. It damn near broke me. People complain that Sonic '06 is one of the worst games ever made. Those people have never played Blinx: The Time Sweeper. People will say that this game is hard and they are right, it is hard, but not for good reasons. It's hard because of bad level design, an awful camera, a character that moves with sloth like speed which takes forever to get any momentum, enemies that take far too long to kill, a core game mechanic that relies heavily on RNG and poorly designed bosses. This is not a good game. Enjoy my vitriol in this blind playthrough.


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